Building New Plex Server - Looking for tweeks

[maximillianrg]

Given my i7 desktop, Intel Celeron Plex Server, and DroboPro 8-bay DAS are all about 9-years old I’ve decided to unify the systems and build a new desktop that wil also run as a Plex Server

CPU : AMD Ryzen Gen 3 Threadripper 3970 Passmark = 47,700
GPU : Quadro P2000
Motherboard : ASUS ROG ZENITH II EXTREME sTRX4
Drive 1 : Corsair Force MP600 M.2 2280 1TB PCI-Express Gen 4.0 (Windows Boot)
Drive 2 : Corsair Force MP600 M.2 2280 2TB PCI-Express Gen 4.0 (Plex meta data)
Drive 3: Drobo 5D3 with (3) 10TB Ironwolf NAS Drives (18TB usable space to start)
RAM : 64GB

I know this is overkill for a Plex server but will make a great all purpose machine. Thoughts?

[tom80H]

I agree… it’s overkill
Unless you plan on tons of parallel sharing of to-be transcoded content… that passmark is good for 3+ parallel 4K HDR transcodes (e.g. 50Mbps, 10-bit HEVC to 10 Mbps 1080p) or 20+ parallel 1080p transcodes

Considering you have a Plex Pass you might be much better off with a decent CPU that supports hardware accelerated streaming (unless of course the server has a second use as radiator, heating your house
https://support.plex.tv/articles/115002178853-using-hardware-accelerated-streaming/

Also… if all you do is using this machine as Plex Media Server, your setup is quite oversized when it comes to the SSDs:

• Windows boot can easily work on a 128 or 256GB SSD
• I have a similarly sized library and all my Plex metadata takes no more than 50 GB incl. video thumbs

But hey… it’ll nonetheless be in an impressive (oversized) media server. I hope you’ll enjoy it.